ATI admits 9700 Pro bug with AGP8X
Posted by Daniel Fleshbourne on 17 September 2002 - 09:39 · no comments & 118 views
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If you have recently bought one of these cards you are unlikely to be able to run it at the 8X AGP which was boasted by the company at launch. Finally ATI has admitted there is a problem with the card and it has engineers looking into it.
This is what ATI says:
"In certain cases, after installing the RADEON 9700 PRO 128MB in an AGP 8x capable motherboard, the system will not post, or boot up. Not all AGP 8x motherboards are affected. Some customer's have reported that lowering the AGP transfer speed in some instances, will allow the system to then post. ATI Engineering has been advised of this issue and is investigating. Any updates will appear on this page when they become available."
What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings.
Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory".
The Pentagon then thought it could keep its mishap quiet, it underestimated Van Riper, who has promptly blew the whistle on the cheating by the US "Blue" side. The "Red" side was a militarily powerful Middle Eastern nation on the Persian Gulf that was home to a crazed but cunning megalomaniac, set in the not so distant future of 2007.
As Van Riper says, even when playing an evil dictator, the marine veteran clearly takes winning very seriously. He reckoned Blue would try to launch a surprise strike, in line with the administration's new pre-emptive doctrine, "so I decided I would attack first."
Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue's boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks.
Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from some of the small boats sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the Blue fleet did not seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.
It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game called time out. In the end, it was ruled that the Blue forces had had the $250m equivalent of their fingers crossed and were not really dead, while the ships were similarly raised from watery graves. What came next was like a script being enacted by actors.
First Red's side was told that US electronic warfare planes had zapped his expensive microwave communications systems, so that Red would have to use cellphones and satellite phones. Red said that they were going to use motorcycle messengers and make announcements from the mosques, but Blue refused to accept that we'd do anything they wouldn't do in the west! Next, Red was told to TURN OFF his air defences off at certain times and places where Blue forces were about to stage an attack, and to move his forces away from beaches where the marines were scheduled to land.
As Van Riper said after the ill-fdated war games... "Scripting is not a problem because you're trying to learn something," he says. "The difference with this one was that it was advertised up front as free play in order to validate the concepts they were trying to test, to see if they were robust enough to put into doctrine."